More than 50 years ago, the government of Cuban leader Fidel Castro seized the power plants of the Cuban Electric Company. You’d be forgiven for thinking that would have spelled the electric company’s demise. You’d be wrong.

In fact, the company (ticker: CGAR) held its annual shareholder meetingin Naperville, Ill., last November. It has approximately 1,669 shareholders, one of whom is a closed-end mutual fund manager we wrote about this past weekend.

In terms of assets, all that Cuban Electric has now is $18.8 million in cash and a 50-year-old, $267,568,414 claim (not including interest) against the Cuban government for taking its power plants.

Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, the company came to be majority-owned by OfficeMax, the office-supply retailer. Matthew Broad, OfficeMax’s general counsel, serves as the electric company’s president, though he estimates he spends only about four hours per year on company business. He says that he and OfficeMax staff as a whole spend about 20 hours.

Broad admits that Cuban Electric Company shareholder meetings are a pretty humdrum affair. For one, no outside shareholders have shown up for more than a decade, he says. Still, he says the board goes through the regulatory required motions to keep the company going.

Shares of the company used to be listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, but now only trade over the counter. Even that is only allowed under a license granted by the U.S. Treasury Department that expires in September (it could always be renewed).

One day, Broad hopes that the Cuban government chooses to settle at least a portion of the claim, perhaps as a precursor to the U.S. lifting its embargo against the country. Until then, the company has to just go through the required motions to stay alive.